marsman2020

Maybe they decided that if World Update 4 and Sim Update 4 are being combined and moved later in the year, they wanted to get rid of the snow now so it's not winter all through the spring....

The TKS anti-icing works on the DA-62 (I've never run it long enough to see if the fluid runs out like real life), that is the smallest aircraft in the sim with anti-icing. Note that it is anti-icing, not de-icing, so you need to turn it on before entering icing conditions.

My thoughts after a short flight and 2 landings: Flight model seems very well tuned. (I highly recommend straight linear response curves for controls, it seems to be tuned with that in mind. Stacking non-linear curves on top of this tuning might detract from the good work that has been done.) Taxis easily. Needs some right rudder on takeoff (expected due to P-factor) but once you get the hang of it it’s very controllable. Trims very nicely for a constant climb rate or level flight. The trim behavior was so good that I did not use the 'convenience' click-spot alt hold (which the real aircraft doesn't have but JF has helpfully included, great decision) at all on my test flights. Many of the stock aircraft seem hard to trim (pitch unstable so they bounce back and forth a lot), this seems much more realistic. Very stable in turns, doesn’t have the ‘shuddering’ that some of the stock Asobo aircraft has, holds a bank angle nicely through a turn. Very very well behaved on short final, roundout, and flare. Comes in on final nicely with full flaps, drag seems well tuned. Responds well to changes in power to control descent rate. Easy to fly along 6 inches above runway for a little bit and really grease the landing. Great touchdowns the very first two times I landed it. It has a feeling of stability and inertia to it during landing that the stock aircraft don’t have. A contender with the Turbo Bonanza mod for "awesomest feeling flare in a GA aircraft", which is saying a LOT. Whoever tuned the elevator effectiveness vs speed on this flight model did an excellent job. I know it takes many many many hours to tune a flight model in the sim to this level. Stalls and spins seem well modeled. Without power it just mushes without a clean stall break which I’ve read is generally correct for a Piper. With some power you can get it to stall and drop a wing, but easy to recover from the spin. The sounds seem well done. Stall horn especially has a nice sound to it. Switches, knobs, etc all have sounds that match what they are doing and give a nice tactile feeling. The 'gear unsafe' warning is suitably annoying. The one downside is I do think some of the interior textures could be improved a bit. There is nothing super glaring in the ‘normal’ cockpit views, but for instance if you turn around behind you while maintaining the ‘default’ head position there is a knob in the ceiling which is indeed interact-able and has a very rough looking label on it, in the default zoom and head position, even without any 'pixel peeping'. Weighed against a flight model that put a huge smile on my face on the very first landing............I don't think it's a huge issue. I haven't had a chance to play around too much with the avionics, hopefully over the weekend. Can't wait for the two Turbo models 🙂

I've sold a bunch of PC parts to friends lately, and the only thing I can say is...that's not a friend price.

I am seeing about 10 fps less then previously, around 35 fps in the cockpit view of a Bonanza flying around KMHV with 'HIGH-END' settings except glass cockpit refresh on HIGH. My GPU use is at only 75%, if it was at 100% that would be 1/3rd more FPS which is exactly the delta I am seeing. I'm also used to seeing GPU use pegged at 100% while flying. The dev mode FPS counter is constantly flickering back and forth between 'limited by mainthread' and 'limited by CPU' FlightSimulator.exe is only using 12% of my CPU. It looks like it is loading up about 3 cores and that is it. Something is borked for sure. I know the 5700XT isn't the most powerful GPU out there but my PC is pretty beefy and they have really wrecked the performance. I won't even bother trying with my VR headset...

This isn't mountain driven. It happens over flat terrain, and it is massive instant shifts in wind and barometric pressure. It's down to how they have implemented weather engine.

The title of this thread unfortunately is misleading and it's become clear since it was written that the Legacy flight model totally breaks things for pretty much any MSFS aircraft.

There are tons of people over on the official MSFS forums and here having freezes, CTDs, and poor performance with no mods installed. Not that it will keep you from picking on people who are having issues.

There is a big difference between saying the platform was expected to have a 10 year life, and then releasing a 1/3rd or 1/2 done platform and then trying to argue that the prior statement means we should give them a pass on actually finishing it.

I don't think there is anything that says the cells need to be the same at the boundary, since it's one value being used for the entire cell. Imagine it as the value at the centroid of that cell. They need to do some kind of smoothing to prevent this.

The sim was represented as being done and a media hype train was spun up based on it being done. The "10 year journey" pivot didn't happen until after release. People deserve the working product they paid for at release. Some of us might not even be alive in 10 years.....many older simmers in the community... It is what it is and there is really nothing to do about it now, but the product was seriously misrepresented at release and I think people are justified to be disappointed and frustrated to see the promised improvements pushed off further and further into the future every month. The likely reason why we don't see any of the improvements we want on the PC until "Summer 2021" and "Fall 2021" - a FULL YEAR after release - is because they are too busy making the X-Box version to fix it. Too much of the development work is in the "X-Box branch" which includes things like DX12, and it will take months and months after the X-Box release to merge all those changes back into the PC version. What we have now is truly Alpha software, pushed out the door because some suits at Microsoft said to do so. Behind the scenes they are totally rewriting everything, which is why we get broken update after broken update and months and months of delays to fix even the highest voted bugs.

I've seen a couple of reports of this on MSFS forums. I think what is happening is that there are 'cells' in the weather data and when you cross the 'cell' boundaries it creates a very rapid change in weather conditions which over stresses the aircraft. It also shows as a large instant change in speed/altitude, with a corresponding single turbulent event. I've seen this on a small scale in my Bonanza a few times and it can be scary. The transition between weather 'cells' should be feathered over several minutes or seconds where the sim interpolates between the old values and the new values, to avoid an instant change. Or as a workaround if that is too difficult, the structural damage detection should be automatically toggled off around the 'cell' boundaries to allow things to settle down. Unless there is some kind of a giant storm, a modern aircraft should not be structurally destroyed by turbulence. I'd recommend filing a ZenDesk ticket and a bug on the official forum.

Great video Working Title team!

On the MSFS forum one person mentioned that setting the Terrain Detail slider to 50 or less helped, or turning off Bing Data (!!) Suggesting that people change render scaling is totally lame advice for an issue where the CPU chokes and the GPU is twiddling its thumbs. Reducing the load on the GPU further won't help.

From another poster further up in the thread:

Since JF has been responsive to feedback and there are plans to add some visual representation of icing - l plan to grab this tonight and give it a spin, although it's the Turbo in a few weeks I am really interested in.

The inclusion of the 'no scratches' windshield texture is a nice touch. Perhaps a future revision of the installer could better highlight this, or even offer a radio button so the user can select which they would like at installation. Or even have a simple Windows .bat file that does the switch that people can click on.

I put my Steam in offline mode, restarted it, then put it back in Online mode, restarted it, and now all seems well. Not sure if the servers may have just come back up in the interim.

Did you happen to file an issue on github or otherwise reach out to the WT folks?

Being a community manager is a front-facing PR job and they have to have an enthusiastic attitude. The CMs have been commenting in more threads on the official forums lately and when things go totally sideways like the delayed update they are the ones bearing the brunt of that. So I personally wouldn't pick on them for trying to do their job well. It can't be easy being inbetween the mass of customers here and the devs, especially given some of the challenges the sim is facing. (Given my own personality, I don't think I could be a CM)

Disabling hyperthreading/SMT might also be something to try, based on the reported symptom of 1 windows task manager "core" going to 100%. If that core is part of an SMT pair with another highly loaded core, it could cause things to not run smoothly. The Windows scheduler is pretty dumb in my experience.

It's always great when you can turn something you are passionate about into a full time job. I'm sure this is likely to bear great fruit in the area of the stock Garmins in the sim. However I am personally very concerned that given MSes consistent re-statement that they don't want to compete with 3DP aircraft developers and create study level aircraft, this will mean the end of the CJ4, integrating Navigraph charts when NavBlue is the official provider for MSFS, etc. So I guess I'm in the excited and scared at the same time category as well. We will have to wait and see if Microsoft is a good steward of the capabilities they are getting here. Totally understand that WT folks likely can't respond to this beyond the pre-approved FAQ at this point...best of luck with the new arrangement to all involved.

If it is related to the spike fix and post-processing the terrain mesh (possibly the coastline fix as well, if they are "pulling back" the coastline in realtime on the users PC), then turning off the online data limits the terrain mesh to the simplified version that is installed on your PC which could significantly reduce the processing required.

In a post here a while back the user who created the community spike fix said that they thought some terrain mesh post-processing algorithms were being run on our individual user PCs, so it is actually possible that the Asobo spike fix caused this if they added more post-processing instead of fixing the actual mesh. The behavior described makes a lot of sense if the sim is loading a new block of terrain mesh as your aircraft crosses some distance threshold, then doing some CPU intensive processing of it, then stopping that processing until another block of mesh needs to be processed. With all the marketing about MSFS being "in the cloud" I'd expect that they would run any post-processing server side with the fancy Azure supercomputers, and not on our individual PCs. It's inefficient to have every user's copy of the sim doing that when they could run it once as the data is ingested into the servers. You might try reducing some of the terrain mesh detail sliders and see if it helps at all.

The Content Manager updates may have been for the Aviator's Club liveries, so if you don't have those installed they might not show up